Couple from different cultures find love is a common ground

Laleh Emileh and Sam Elayyoub have some fun on the way to their wedding on December 26, at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in San Jose.

Laleh Emileh and Sam Elayyoub have some fun on the way to their wedding on December 26, at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in San Jose.

Photo: Ed Carlo Garcia Photography

Photo: Ed Carlo Garcia Photography

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Laleh Emileh and Sam Elayyoub have some fun on the way to their wedding on December 26, at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in San Jose.

Laleh Emileh and Sam Elayyoub have some fun on the way to their wedding on December 26, at St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in San Jose.

Photo: Ed Carlo Garcia Photography

Couple from different cultures find love is a common ground

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Women who are sports fans in Iran have limited options as to what sports they can see live — they’re banned from attending soccer games, for example, since the fans can get unruly. Laleh Emileh was always a major basketball fan — “since birth,” she says — and attended many live basketball games in her native Tehran.

At one of these games in 2003, at Azadi Stadium in Tehran, Laleh, then 17, witnessed something she would not soon forget: It was a matchup in the Middle East Youth Basketball League, and the defending champion, Iran, was losing to Jordan when a tall, blondish Jordanian player purposely injured one of the Iranian team’s highest scorers. The Jordanian, also 17, was kicked out of the game, but his team went on to win the title.

Laleh, 29, left Iran in 2010, and settled in San Francisco, later moving to San Carlos. She has worked in everything from human resources to flower arranging, and now is an accountant for Baychem, a chemical company.

In March of last year, her manager asked her to have lunch with a new hire. His name was Mutasem “Sam” Elayyoub, and he had received his MBA from the Keller School of Management in Dallas and arrived in San Jose for a contract position (that job ended and Sam is now the lead developer at Outsell in Burlingame).

Says Laleh now: “When my manager asked me to come, my first thought was ‘Why me?’ I heard he was from Jordan, and I thought, ‘He’s going to hate me for being from Iran.’ ”

Nevertheless, she chose the Jordanian-owned Dish n Dash in Sunnyvale for the group.

She expected Sam to be short and with a full beard; he was neither.

One of her first questions to him was about his height, and she quickly learned that not only had he played basketball, but something even more surprising: That he was the one who had made that controversial move all those years ago that had cost Iran the title.

Yet the conversation flowed so easily — especially when they learned that they shared a love of comedian Jeff Dunham’s “Achmed the Dead Terrorist” ventriloquist act — so much so that the others at the table were left out of the conversation.

Both had strong misconceptions about the other that could have easily derailed things. Sam asked why Laleh wasn’t wearing a hijab; Laleh got defensive, saying Iran’s post-revolution government does not represent her, or most Iranians for that matter. She had her own misconceptions about Sam, and quickly learned that he’s Christian Orthodox and proud of his Jordanian Christian heritage.

“Most Americans put us all in the same category as Middle Easterners,” Laleh says, “but between us, we are so different. Our language isn’t the same, nothing is the same.”

Sam’s family had been pushing him to settle down, but he hadn’t felt any urgency — that is, until he met Laleh.

“This is what I want,” he thought to himself. “I don’t need to look anywhere else.”

Finally, Sam asked Laleh to join him for a movie he was seeing with his team later that afternoon. Laleh says she accepted for professional reasons, but something more personal soon crept in. “The last thing we did was watch the movie,” she says. “We were talking and laughing the whole time.”

Dinner followed.

When Sam got home that night, he called his brother-in-law, saying: “I believe I came to California to get married. I found who I want.”

Laleh hadn’t been focused on finding a husband, but meeting Sam “felt like this happy accident. While I tend to overanalyze everything, this was a decision that just made sense.”

It helped matters that Laleh had been baptized a few years earlier.

Laleh slowly started leaving things in Sam’s apartment. Then last June, Sam’s mother surprised him by showing up unannounced. She hadn’t seen her son in four years.

Living together before marriage isn’t done in either of their cultures, so Sam did the only thing he could think of: He told his mother he had gotten married. After her shock wore off, “my mother fell in love with Laleh immediately,” Sam says. “Within days they were doing things without me.”

The couple, who now live in Redwood City, actually did marry after Sam’s mother left, June 30, 2015, at City Hall. Sam asked Laleh’s brother, who lives locally, for his blessing. And together, the couple decided Christmas would be the perfect time for a church wedding so their families could attend.

“We come from cultures where we don’t usually decide who we’ll marry on our own,” Laleh says. “But all of them were so supportive.”

For their honeymoon, the couple took their immediate family members in an RV to Las Vegas and Disneyland.

Guests flew in from around the world, although some, including Laleh’s father, couldn’t get visas to travel because of the timing of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

“If we hadn’t come to America, none of this would have happened,” Laleh says. “It’s so surreal; we come from two totally different backgrounds. But when I saw my mom holding hands with his dad at the wedding, I was shocked at how these two people are walking together in San Jose. It didn’t make sense to me at all, but it happened, and that’s the beauty of it.”